Kichi’s Mother: “Once, in Kyoto, I heard a great priest talk. ‘Those who sin in this world go to purgatory when they die.'”
Kichi’s Wife: “What’s purgatory? The dead are just ashes.”
Kichi’s Mother: “No, that’s not true. They say hell really exists. A hell of fire, a hell of fury, a hell for sinners. The terrible mountain of needles, the lake of blood. The punishment for sinful lust is the worst of all. Souls with human faces grow four legs and fall into a sinner’s hell.”
Two armored Japanese soldiers, one older, one younger, flee across a field of windswept grass tall enough to hide them from their pursuers… or so they think. The men are slain unexpectedly, stabbed through the grass ringing a little clearing. Onibaba is not their story. Nor is it the story of their killers, the two soldiers who ride away from the skirmish and out of the film entirely. A moment later, two women, one younger, one older, approach the dead men and quickly and methodically remove their armor and weapons. Dragging both bodies by the feet, the women dump them unceremoniously down a large, dark hole in the ground. Later the women will trade the soldiers’ belongings for food. This is wartime. They are scavengers. Onibaba is their story. If nothing else, it proves that if you make a face, it might just stay that way.
Though Japanese in appearance and style, particularly in terms of the exaggerated acting and minimal score and soundtrack, Onibaba‘s emotions are universal. The conflict, gradually drawn against a pattern of scavenging, eating, sleeping, and chores, centers around the two women and a third individual, named Hachi (Kei Satô). The women are not named, and are credited as Kichi’s Mother (Nobuko Otowa) and Kichi’s Wife (Jitsuko Yoshimura). Kichi, never seen in the film, went off to war sometime before with Hachi; deserters, Kichi is killed and Hachi returns alone to find Mother and Wife surviving by stealing equipment from those soldiers who die in their fields. Sometimes the soldiers aren’t all the way dead yet, and Wife must take them the rest of the way. War makes beasts of us all.
Hachi, who at one point waits outside the women’s hut and barks like a dog, seems to be a beast by nature already. “He’s in heat,” scowls Mother, and indeed Hachi propositions his dead friend’s wife almost immediately upon his return home from the war. Wife finds herself responsive, and begins having nightly assignations with Hachi, running through the grassy field to his hut with a wild combination of nervousness and eagerness. With her son dead, Mother’s ties to her partner in survival are now tenuous, and if Wife leaves to live with or even marry Hachi, Mother won’t make it on her own. This fear, mixed with a potent jealousy, leads Mother to acts of desperation. Although scornful of Wife’s lusts, Mother finds herself literally climbing the trees, and later throwing herself at Hachi, begging him to be satisfied with her and not to take Wife away. Rejected, Mother eventually hits upon another scheme. This time she turns to religion, the means by which elders have always attempted to control the sexual appetites of the young. “The punishment for sinful lust is the worst of all,” she claims, describing the fires of hell beneath them. This isn’t quite accurate. But then, Mother spends a lot of time saying things that aren’t true. So do all the characters.
In form, if not wholly in substance, Onibaba is essentially a hothouse movie. Take away the Japanese costumes and it could just as easily be a Southern Gothic, set during the Civil War. The conflict is reminiscent of American films like Days of Heaven and Stoker, movies where fields and farmland swelter in summer heat while sexual tension gathers like a threatening stormcloud until it bursts through social taboos and inspires violent, jealous reactions from observers. Wife worries about the sin of sleeping with Hachi, but he assures her that “people have been doing this for thousands of years.” That doesn’t make it right, of course, but Hachi is a creature who will do and say anything to satisfy his needs. This does not make him unique compared to the women; he’s simply more honest about it. During a sexual dry spell, for instance, he yells and runs about, half-insane with pent-up energy, and after finally sleeping with Wife once more, exclaims that his head is clear again. For her part, Wife is willing to brave Mother’s distaste and uncertain hellfire to quench her own desires, and although Mother is loathe to admit it, she’s not above trickery to try and keep her daughter-in-law around. Likewise, the handful of other characters, mostly soldiers passing through, tend to use violence when necessary to get what they need. Selfishness may or may not be a natural state of affairs, but it is the dominant mode of these people in this time–as in any time of strife and hunger.
The trio’s emotional turmoil is expressed visually, in a film whose rich, high-contrast black and white photography focuses our attention on the actors’ eyes and bodies and on movement in the frame. The women sleep topless in their hut on straw mats, collapsing backwards at the end of a hard day of physical labor and awakening in the night still dripping with sweat. They perform their chores with a practiced rhythm–in a film mostly silent except for the dialogue, the most consistent sound effect is the staccato pounding of fish, grain, and wood, later mimicked in the percussive score. Deliberate in their movements, both Wife and Mother often face away from whomever they’re conversing with, looking back or askance with wide, scheming eyes. Hachi is defined by his scruffy beard and heavy brow, Mother by her thick eyebrows and the telltale white streak in her hair–his virile masculinity versus her overbearing nature and fear of aging in conflict over Wife’s youthful beauty. Surrounding it all, the grass is a constant presence. The wind sways it this way and that in a thousand trembling directions, creating impossibly intricate patterns of light and shadow. The grass acts like the forest in Rashomon, establishing a kind of moral and narrative space within its boundary where the characters’ actions seem temporarily severed from society’s moral dictates. Its presence on screen is like the drawn lines of a manga panel or the sweep of a theatrical curtain, defining, separating, and vividly evincing the feelings the characters cannot fully reveal.
But Onibaba is not really about whether or not it is right for Wife to sleep with Hachi, or for Mother to try and dissuade her. The deeper sin, which all three of them share, is one of insufficient reverence for the dead. Wife’s sin is not having an affair with Hachi, but in having it so soon after learning of the death of her husband. Hachi does not really seem sorry that he came home without Kichi at his side. Wife tells Mother that “the dead are just ashes,” and both women are willing to rob the dead and dying soldiers and dispose of their bodies by ignominiously dropping them down the corpse hole. (One memorable shot has both turning expectantly toward a column of smoke rising in the distance, eager as gore crows for their next meal.) In fact, the film makes it clear that their efforts actually perpetuate the cycle of death–by selling used armor and weaponry to a profiteer who turns around and sells them back to the two clashing armies, Wife and Mother are complicit in sustaining the very war which has forced them to this point. “There’s no telling when the war will end,” says Hachi, and as long as people like the three of them continue to treat human life cavalierly, it never will.
The beginning of the movie, even before the opening credits, shows us a dark pit, half-hidden in the grass. “The hole,” title cards read. “Deep and dark. Its darkness has lasted since ancient times.” Like the lust between Hachi and Wife, or Mother’s jealous need to secure her position in the family, the hole goes back a long way. It also goes down a long way, as one traveling soldier in a demon’s mask discovers after Mother tricks him into falling into it. Later she climbs down to steal his things, surrounded by the bones of her and Wife’s former victims, and the next night that same demon finds itself in Wife’s path, standing between her and Hachi’s hut, its silent grin promising all the fires of hell. Mother’s ironic punishment for this desperate, Scooby Doo-esque deception is that the demon mask ends up seared to her face–held there by horrible gaping sores, presumably the result of some rotting disease passed from the dead soldier to Mother by the mask, but metaphoric justice for her theft. In the pouring rain and thrashing grass and Mother’s pained screams, the overall effect evokes the supernatural, a sense of divine retribution for all their sins. Hachi is killed just as casually as he himself would have, by another deserter caught stealing his food; and Mother, hoist by her own petard in every sense, ends the film suspended in midair, in mid-shot, tricked over the very pit she used to kill the demon-masked soldier. All of the characters are abandoned by the film with this merciless abruptness, hanging eternally in a state of cinematic purgatory, sinners all, feeling irony’s twisting knife between their ribs, and beneath them, hell. It is deep and dark, and its darkness has lasted since ancient times. And once they’ve fallen, none of them will ever climb back out again.
Every year, Kyu attempts to watch and review 31 horror movies in 31 days. This year, it’s Killtoberfest 666, because there really is no such things as demons. Check out past Killtoberfests along with this year’s reviews, and be sure to follow us on Twitter @insidethekraken to track Kyu’s progress.